Lessons learned for Afghanistan

Afghanistan has been called “the right war”; “a war we can win”; “the war we should have been fighting all along.” This should set off loud alarms because it suggests that military victory in Afghanistan will be nearly automatic if we just show up with enough troops. And, once again, some of our top military and political leaders are planning ahead for the last war; in this case, they’re trying to duplicate the so-called victory in Iraq.

Any notions of certainty are both frightening and naive. Frightening, because they’re founded in the belief that all we have to do is disengage our combat brigades from Iraq and redeploy them to Afghanistan to re-create the success we achieved eight years ago against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Naive, because they’re based on the recurring fantasy that 30,000 more U.S. troops will transform Afghanistan into an ersatz version of a Muslim democracy. Like Iraq.

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Of course, Iraq today — despite claims from neocons and Clinton-Bush-era nation builders — is hardly stable, harmonious or peaceful, except when compared with the sectarian nightmare of Iraq from 2005 to 2007. However, even then, Iraq wasn’t Afghanistan; not even close. To begin with, Afghanistan is a honeycomb of ethnic groups and tribes. About half its people are Pashtuns, from more than 30 different tribes; an additional 25 percent are Tajiks; 18 percent, Hazaras; 6 percent, Uzbeks; 3 percent, Turkmen; 1 percent, Qizilbash; and about 7 percent are Aimaq, Arab, Kirghiz, Wakhi, Farsiwan, Nuristani, Baluch, Brahui, Qizilbash, Kabuli or Jat. The country has been described by journalist Tom Coghlan as “one of the most conservative, opaque and dizzyingly complex tribal societies on earth.”

Second, President Hamid Karzai’s “national” government has little to do with the lives of Afghanis outside Kabul and isn’t even recognized in every sector of that city. Classic counterinsurgency doctrine depends on an indigenous government we can support, but the current national government in Afghanistan doesn’t remotely qualify, unless one considers “worthy” a corrupt government bordering on a kleptocracy, with little real power over 90 percent of the country.

Third, our military presence is a double-edged sword. No country likes to be occupied, patrolled or garrisoned by a foreign military. Our own Founders didn’t take very well to it 233 years ago. The presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to suppress violence and promote peace is often the match that ignites the violence and resistance in the first place. Afghanis have always opposed the presence of large numbers of armed outsiders, and our troops, no matter how well intentioned, will be viewed the same way that Macedonian, British and Soviet troops were viewed in the past.